Inside PDT Partners with Vinesh Jha — The Quant Who Survived the 2007 Meltdown & Built a Data Empire "You don't know what to do. You have to make a decision as to whether you still trust your model." — Vinesh Jha on surviving the Quant Quake when PDT was down $500M We cover: - How PDT Partners navigated a $500M loss in 3 days during the 2007 Quant Quake - Why crowdsourced earnings estimates beat Wall Street analysts at predicting stock moves - The hidden danger of every quant fund using the same data - How LLMs are extracting alpha from earnings call transcripts — beyond simple sentiment - Why raising capital for a quant fund is harder than building the models - The real reason Vinesh chose a data company over running his own hedge fund - Whether Millennium & Citadel will eventually crush every small player - What separates quants who last decades from those who flame out Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 01:00 Inside PDT Partners during the Quant Quake 05:11 How quants decide when models fail 08:49 Culture at PDT vs other hedge funds 10:38 Why Vinesh founded Extract Alpha 15:25 Financial crisis lessons: crowded quant trades 16:20 Will LLMs and NLP in finance get crowded? 18:53 Best alternative data sets for alpha 24:54 Do Estimize crowdsourced forecasts make money? 28:19 Can buzzwords like AI predict returns? 32:02 Why Vinesh didn’t start a hedge fund 35:37 How quants should reinvent mid-career 38:51 AI disruption vs creativity in quant finance 40:48 Can small funds compete with Citadel, Millennium, DE Shaw? 43:30 What makes a good quant stand out 46:54 Closing thoughts on longevity in quant finance

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